Oh, I’m not as old as the really fun speed limit in Montana and Idaho. I’m not even as old as the open interstate limit in Oregon or Washington. But the calendar says that I have arrived at the I-5 speed limit through Eugene. How did this happen????? Aren’t K.C. and the Sunshine Band still cool????? Why did I get funny looks when I wore my bell-bottoms and my boss neck chains to Safeway??? Ban the Bomb baby. I need to burn my draft card. Where is that thing anyway? Ah, here it is, right under my AARP card. Sigh…

And yet, there are good parts to being older than most of my readers. I got to have this Farrah poster up in my dorm room.

I got to drive this baby when it was new

And I got to see this game as my first ever visit to Montlake.

Mostly, though, I have gained some wisdom having been born the same year as Liquid Paper. And, since this is Saturday and I am a Spoof, herein are things that it has taken me 55 years to learn.

1. There are no real consequences to tearing off the mattress tags. Those tags are designed so people won’t tear the tags off at the mattress store and use them as Kleenex.

2. Nothing good ever comes from the short side sweep when the ball is on the hash.. The hash is too close to the sideline. The running back either runs out of room and goes out of bounds or he gets pinned up against the sideline and…wait, wait, wait! This is Fishduck fercryinoutloud! Let me use an optically advanced, highly technical, whiz bangin’ bit of graphic wizardry to show you what I mean.

They don’t call me the Technical Genius around here for nothin’, you know.

3. ”Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” This, my friends, is a Country Crock of Crap. Stay in bed until the last possible minute. You’ll never have an original thought until 10:00 anyway. Before that you’ll just be sucking down coffee and wishing that you were in bed. Besides, if you go to bed early you miss the finest in educational televised entertainment. (Below)

4. When you get into the front court on a 2 on 1 break, DO NOT flare out behind the 3 point line. A 2 on 1 break is poetry in motion when it’s run right. It should result in a score well over 75% of the time and an “and one” at least 25% of the time. When you flare out, it brings the possibility of any kind of a score down to the 40% range and leaves your speeding down the floor teammate in an untenable rebounding position because YOU wanted to make with the Ray Allen. Spacing, ball movement, and a willingness to give up the rock will bring the crowd to it’s feet.

5. If you are asked by a woman to guess her age, miss low. MISS WAY LOW!!! A lady at the grocery store asked me to guess her age the other day. If I had been going to be honest I would have said 163. Instead I said 44. It turns out she was 61. It did no harm to lie. She walked away with a spring in her step and I walked away full of the knowledge that I had gone one more day without being beaten to death with a loaf of French bread. She (below) blew a kiss to me before she left, too.

6.) Never believe a Husky or a Beaver if they say that they don’t wish you harm. They wish that we all had painfully, inflamed and bleeding anal fissures. This is especially true of the ones that frequent Duck message boards and tailgaters, or share Thanksgiving tables with us. Don’t hate them for this. They can’t help it if they were born with only a brain stem. Instead give to one or more of the many charities that are trying to combat these disorders. Like this one, illustrating the plight of one Husky fan.

7. The best ideas that you have are the ones to which NOBODY will listen. Here’s mine. Look, instead of turning the clock back and forth, back and forth, lets do this. When it comes time to set the clocks forward next month, turn them forward 1/2 HOUR and then leave them the hell alone! What would be wrong with that? You wouldn’t have people getting to church early or late the next morning and lying about it (surely condemning them to Hell or Reser Stadium, depending on what else they’ve done wrong)

You wouldn’t have people feeling like they have to plan for the time change for a week in advance by piling up sleep hours. You wouldn’t have people whining about how they can’t be productive because they can’t get used to something that has happened twice a year for every year of their lives! If you have great ideas like this, send them to me in The Fish Bowl.

8.) Someone needs to invent an aluminum type baseball bat that sounds like wood. We can put a man on the moon. Heck, some of us can plan to send a colony to the moon and turn it into “Lunara”, our 51st state. Why in the immortal name of Wimpy Quinn (U of O graduate who had a career batting average of .500 with the Cubs) can’t we design a bat that can be used anywhere from Little League through college that doesn’t have that God forsaken “PING”.

Look, I love baseball. I was one of the original “radio under the covers after I was supposed to be in bed” guys. But when I pressed that transistor to my ear to listen to The Giants play The Padres on a weekday night I got to hear Willie McCovey go deep with the healthy sound of wood on horsehide. THWACK! Not GONG! We have some of the best, most inventive, minds in the world associated with The Ducks. Someone get on this.

9.) Karma is real and she ain’t playing around. I was in the car with my girlfriend one time. We had just gotten something from the AM/PM where Belt Line meets Gateway in Springfield. In juggling my car keys and my Pepsi, I spilled some Pepsi on myself. She called me a slob…and immediately dumped barbecued chicken on her blouse. Karma is your taskmistress and she will never leave you. So remember, when you fly the bird at the driver who cut you off, there is an excellent chance that your daughter will marry his son and they will give you grandchildren who go to OSU…and embarrass you on national television.

Kim Hastings Tacoma, Washington

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Kim Hastings is a 1984 graduate of Northwest Christian College. He cut his journalistic teeth as sports editor of a paper in his home town of Fortuna, CA, and, later as a columnist for the Longview Daily News in Longview, WA.He saw his first Oregon game in 1977 and never missed a home game from 1981 until a bout with pneumonia cut his streak short in 1997. He was one of the proud 3200 on a bitterly cold night in Shreveport, Louisiana in 1989 for the Independence Bowl, and continues to be big supporter of Oregon sports. He is an active participant on the various Oregon Ducks messageboards as "TacomaDuck."